Ice accretion on aircraft in flight can lead to hazardous and sometimes deadly results. Many approaches to solving the problem of aircraft ice accretion have been tried. Among the approaches are: 1) Expanding Bladders; 2) Heating; 3) Ethylene Glycol Bathing; and 4) Electro-expulsive De-icing systems (EEDS).
An EEDS taught by U.S. Pat. No. 9,108,735 discloses a system comprising an inner shell nested inside an outer shell. The system requires expensive tooling to manufacture the inner shell, resulting in long lead times for manufacturing of the required tooling. The installation of the system has “blind bonds” which are time consuming, risky and difficult to achieve. The system includes a frictional design detail as the inner shell is required to rub on the outer shell. As the system is typically expected to fire more than 100,000 times during a typical aircraft lifetime, the rubbing could easily “sand” the skin, resulting in leading edge structural failure. The system imparts actuation forces on the skin which are generally perpendicular to the local skin tangent. These actuation forces result in an extremely loud short, sharp, shock noise, which minimizes or excludes the system/aircraft from being used when covert operations are required.
The system transfers the actuation force to the bottom surface through the deformation of the inner shell. The required deformation of the inner shell saps a significant amount of the actuation force. Consequently, the amount of actuation force required to remove ice is greater. The system is limited in its ability to provide a design that can deliver an actuator force to a specific area of a leading edge which may be accreting ice.
The prior art system typically requires a leading edge skin ply layup modification in order to adequately deice the leading edge. Aircraft manufacturers are typically not enthusiastic about modifying the leading edge as this requires significant amount of retesting and requalification of the aircraft.